Ed Engle: Bear Creek's 'unique' cutthroat trout population

I took a few minutes the other day to consider how many Bear Creeks there must be in Colorado.

From a fly-fisherman's perspective, I know there is a Bear Creek around Evergreen because the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Fishing Regulations brochure lists some special regulations for that particular stream. It also lists special "regs" for a Bear Creek that drains into the Conejos River in the southern part of the state and another Bear Creek in the Dolores River drainage. There is a Bear River up north that joins a few other creeks to form the Yampa River.

If this many Bear Creeks have special regulations, you have to figure that there's a bunch of other Colorado Bear Creeks without regulations that are quietly going about their business. I can only hope that they all hold trout, and at least some of them still harbor a few bears descended from those that originally must have inspired their name.

Native cutthroat trout advocates have probably realized that I've left out a Bear Creek that's recently been in the news quite a bit. It has the most restrictive fishing regulations of any of the Bear Creeks listed in the Parks and Wildlife brochure. Namely, all fishing is prohibited in its upper reaches.

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The Bear Creek watershed is an important recreational area along the Front Range of Colorado. This unassuming Bear Creek's headwaters originate on the east slope of Pikes Peak about five miles southwest of Colorado Springs. The creek then flows generally northeast and enters Fountain Creek at Interstate 25. That's just behind a Walmart store on South Eighth Street. This Bear Creek flows through forested highlands, a regional park, skirts some soccer fields and runs in a concrete lined channel before it reaches Fountain Creek.

Bear Creek is an unassuming stream just west of Colorado Springs which holds the only known population of wild greenback cutthroat trout. (Michael Seraphin/Colorado Parks and Wildlife)

It's not the kind of remote backcountry stream where you'd expect to discover the only pure wild greenback cutthroat trout, but it is, according to a recently published genetic survey of Colorado's cutthroat trout. The study compared the genetic make-up of preserved greenback specimens collected from the South Platte River basin in the late 1800s to those now found in Bear Creek to come to that conclusion.

Apparently J.C. Jones, who homesteaded the headwater area of the creek in 1873, stocked the trout in Bear Creek as part of a plan to attract tourists visiting Pikes Peak to a hotel he wanted to build on his homestead. Jones most likely got his trout from a hatchery near Woodland Park, which lies in the South Platte River drainage. The Jones homestead was in the Arkansas River drainage.

Ed Engle
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PAUL AIKEN
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The study seems to establish what cutthroat trout biologists had begun to assume after preliminary genetic studies in the 1990s indicated that the trout they had re-established as greenbacks in the South Platte River drainage were actually descendants of Colorado River cutthroat trout that had been stocked extensively throughout the state in the early part of the 20th century.

The lead-up to the most recent genetic study's publication reads a little like a spy novel. Colorado Parks and Wildlife fishery biologists had known for some time that the cutthroat population in Bear Creek was "unique" and closed its upper reaches to all fishing in 2004. Since then, the local Trout Unlimited chapter, Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists and U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists have been studying the trout and husbanding the stream along until the powers that be decide how to preserve and manage them.

A few months ago, the Center for Biological Diversity sued the Pike and San Isabel National Forest demanding that popular motorcycle trails in the Bear Creek watershed be closed. The consensus of opinion is that it's going to take a while to sort this all out and, hopefully, come up with a strategy to maintain the Bear Creek habitat for the roughly 750 remaining wild adult greenback cutthroat trout on planet Earth.

In the meantime, a protected brood stock of Bear Creek cutthroats is being propagated in Colorado Parks and Wildlife's hatchery system and at the Leadville National Fish Hatchery, run by the Fish and Wildlife Service. The offspring will be used to establish other wild populations in the future.

All of this can make for pretty dry reading, but I have a bit of a personal stake in the story. It started more than a decade ago with a casual telephone call from a friend associated with Trout Unlimited. He told me that I might want to fish upper Bear Creek as soon as possible because it was going to be closed to fishing in the near future to protect a population of greenback cutthroat trout. At the time, that wasn't such a big deal.

"Greenbacks" had been re-established in Rocky Mountain National Park and a number of other streams in the South Platte River basin. When the populations stabilized, catch-and-release fishing was allowed and I'd caught my share of what I thought were greenbacks. Nonetheless, there was something in my friend's tone of voice that just made me think I might want to give Bear Creek a try.

I hiked up the creek from a road called High Drive and didn't stop until I was well past the natural and artificial barriers that had prevented other trout from hybridizing with the greenbacks. They weren't difficult to catch, but they were different. The trout I caught seemed lighter in color with yellowish red pectoral fins and black spots that were concentrated toward the tail.

The largest one I caught was about 6 or 7 inches long and had the oval parr marks that I'd always associated with younger trout. I actually had one of these trout jump up and take my dry fly in the air before I had time to dap it on the water's surface.

I caught and released a few of them and spent the rest of the day just watching them. Maybe it was the light, but they seemed more luminous than other trout as they darted about in this unassuming stream just west of Colorado's second largest metropolitan area. A little more than a year later, they closed that part of the creek to fishing, but I have walked it many times since then and the trout were still there, still luminous.

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